Stephen Kaufer on subscription strategy
From The Travel Giant Built on Billions of Reviews | Steve Kaufer on TripAdvisor · · Kleiner Perkins
“Trip Advisor Plus was uh was our uh co invention. Okay. Uh as the political saying goes, never let a good crisis go to waste. Uh we were able to secure enough uh you know bank loans to go through you know like Trip Advisor was profitable since that very first uh quarter in 2002 uh every quarter until COVID where revenue dropped 90% and you know hit the fan. worst day for the company as we had to do layoffs and that sort of stuff. But in the vein of hey now that expectations are nothing, what can we reinvent about our company and our answer was Trif Advisor Plus uh which should have been done differently.”
On , Stephen Kaufer, Former President & Chief Executive Officer at TRIPADVISOR INC, spoke about subscription strategy during The Travel Giant Built on Billions of Reviews | Steve Kaufer on TripAdvisor on Kleiner Perkins.
About Stephen Kaufer
Stephen Kaufer, co-founder and former CEO of Tripadvisor, was inducted into the Phocuswright Hall of Fame in 2023 for his role in shaping the online travel industry. In a 2024 interview, Kaufer discussed his philosophy of prioritizing speed in company culture, stating he placed a "speed wins" sign on his office door and encouraged employees to give optimistic deadlines without penalty for missing them. He also emphasized that a CEO's primary job is to prevent underperforming employees from joining the company in the first place, rather than relying on performance systems to remove them later. Kaufer has continued to comment on industry dynamics, including Google's influence on travel search. In a 2019 interview, he said Google should "stay a search engine" and argued that concentrated competitive landscapes burden innovation. He also addressed Tripadvisor's past content moderation policies, noting that the company initially removed a review about an assault at a Mexican resort because it violated a "G-rated" policy, but later changed the policy to allow such firsthand accounts. Kaufer has since launched a new venture, Give Freely, which redirects commissions from online purchases to users' chosen charities.